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In this paper, we use directional antenna arrays instead of large-scale antenna arrays to combat the severe propagation path loss, and propose a novel beam channel model for millimeter-wave (mmWave) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. The sparsity of mmWave channel and the directivity gain of mmWave antenna arrays are considered in the proposed model, and the antenna directivity gain is affected by the beamwidth, i.e., the narrower the beam, the higher the antenna directivity gain. Also, the beamwidth affects the number of active clusters, i.e., the wider the beam, the more the active clusters. Based on the proposed beam channel model, the influence of antenna directivity gain on the channel statistical characteristics including space-time correlation, frequency correlation function, and achievable rate is investigated. It is found that the directional antenna arrays can reduce Doppler spread caused by the movement of UAV and receiver and the mmWave communication systems using directional antenna arrays with high directivity gains can achieve an equivalent performance gain to that of the mmWave communication systems using omni-directional large-scale antenna arrays. Furthermore, considering the correlation between transmit and receive antenna elements, we obtain a closed-form expression of the tight upper bound of achievable rate, which is validated by using previously reported analytical upper bound and the simulation results.
Lian et al. (Fri,) studied this question.